How to Address Customer Pain and Pleasure for High Retention

For a business, the primary goal is to have satisfied customers and increase sales—and there is nothing wrong with it. After all, happy customers with scaling revenue and good profits are essential to build a successful business. 

As a service provider, though, you will only make money when you prioritize customer success as much as you value profits. Customers will not go through difficult and non-personalized experiences just to get loyalty points or rewards. 

Result? High customer churn and compromised revenue rate.

You win their loyalty when you alleviate customer pain points and create a delightful journey by focusing on what makes them happy. Satisfied customers will also recommend your business to peers, generating more leads and increasing sales. 

But to weave in customer pain points and pleasure into your sales and marketing strategy, you must identify and understand them first. How? Let discuss—

What are customer pain points?

Customer pain points refer to the consistent challenges your users face with products or services that may disrupt their experience with your brand. Simply put, customer pain points specific elements of your CX that don’t align with customer needs. 

For example, you could lose customers if your checkout process is inefficient and complex. Many users may even purchase the inefficiencies, but it’s quite unlikely for them to come back. 

Some companies even include questions to collect customer data in this stage, which can inconvenience the CX. So, if you notice significant drop-outs on the check-out page, it’s time to consider it a pain point and address it proactively. 

Why it matters

So why are we focusing so much on customer pain points? These are some of the reasons why it should be one of the focal points of your business as well: 

- Addressing customer pain points streamlines and simplifies customer experience
- Identifying these issues can help you position your products as the best solution to customer challenges
- By detecting and solving customer challenges early, you can meet expectations where other brands fall short, gaining a competitive edge
- Proactively dealing with customer pain points also boosts loyalty and, in turn, retention.Addressing customer pain points streamlines and simplifies customer experience
- Identifying these issues can help you position your products as the best solution to customer challenges
- By detecting and solving customer challenges early, you can meet expectations where other brands fall short, gaining a competitive edge
- Proactively dealing with customer pain points also boosts loyalty and, in turn, retention.

How to address customer pain points for high retention

Customer pain points keep shifting. To maintain high retention, your customer retention strategies to address customer challenges must be agile and data-driven. 

Is it overwhelming? The following strategies will simplify the process and help you address each pain point precisely. 

1. Identify pain points via customer feedback

Want to know what challenges your customers face? There is no better way than asking them directly. 

From good old customer surveys to more modern social listening tools, you can use several channels to gather customer feedback. 

If you are already sending out surveys, ask the right questions. It should be a mix of multiple-choice and open-ended queries. That way, you can get quantitative and qualitative feedback on customer pain points. 

Here are some useful questions to include in your customer surveys: 

• What problems did you want to solve through our product/service? 
• Where is our product/service lacking to solve your challenges? 
• How can we improve? 
• What would you like to use as an alternative to our product/service? 

Online reviews and testimonials are goldmines for collecting customer pain points. So, monitor third-party review websites to get the most authentic customer challenges. 

Dissatisfied customers often don’t bother to leave reviews. But they may talk about their experience online. You can also use social listening tools to monitor such conversations. 

Chris Masanto, the CEO and co-founder of PetLab Co., says,

“In the fiercely competitive market, staying ahead isn’t just about having great products; it’s about continuously evolving based on customer feedback. At PetLab, we’ve harnessed the power of customer feedback not as a mere formality but as a strategic tool. We regularly analyze customer insights to identify not just immediate product improvements but also emerging market trends and unmet needs. This approach has enabled us to innovate proactively, often addressing concerns our customers didn’t even know they had. As a result, we’ve not only retained a loyal customer base but have consistently outpaced competitors in delivering solutions that truly resonate with pet owners’ evolving needs.”

2. Conduct focus group discussions with churned customers

To solve the gravest customer pain points and boost retention, you must understand what issues made some customers leave your brand in the first place. 

Here, focused group discussion can be a big help. Developed by US Sociologist Robert Merton, these discussions aim to gauge the “subjective experiences” determining an individual’s response to a particular item. These can be very useful to understand why your product isn’t satisfying your target customers. 

For example, psychologist Ernest Dichter also used focus groups to understand why people took debts from loan sharks rather than banks. He found that people were apprehensive about bank loans because they felt judged by the bankers. So he suggested that banks should offer checking accounts with overdrafts so customers won’t have to come in to apply for a loan.

To do the same for your business, ask churned customers if they’d be willing to participate in a focus group discussion. Incentivize them to maximize participation.

Ask questions like “What alternatives did you consider or switch to?”, “What were your biggest frustrations with our products?”, “What could we have done better to keep you as a customer?”

3. Prioritize the pain points for maximum impact

Once you identify customer pain points, you must prioritize them according to their effect and urgency. Empathy mapping is a useful way to understand the intricacies of your customer’s feelings, challenges, and desires. There are typically four quadrants for what customers say, do, think, and feel. You can fill in each section with data from customer surveys, journey mapping, and buyer personas. It will help you detect and prioritize the most impactful issues before they escalate.

For example, Amazon used empathy mapping to identify their shoppers’ common challenges. One of the urgent pain points they found was difficulty finding the desired products. Now, Amazon offers personalized product recommendations whenever you browse their site or application. 

4. Conduct competitor analysis to identify industry benchmarks

Another excellent way of detecting previously unnoticed customer pain points is to assess your competitors and check where they are doing better than you. They can detect customer challenges you hadn’t considered and learn from how your rivals solve them. 

Product benchmarking your offerings with your contemporary brands also lets you identify your weak points. SWOT analysis, a common element of competitor analysis, can help you see where your competitors are lacking to address customer issues and build strategies to capitalize on those. It can also help you refine your customer personas with a more industry-specific view of customer pain points.

Competitor analysis enables continuous improvements, letting you adapt to shifting customer challenges. This further helps in boosting customer retention. 

5. Develop solutions to address the issues

Instead of handling pain points as mere problems to solve, treat them as growth opportunities and develop specific ways to address them. 

Start with implementing feature requests. It is an invaluable method of getting solutions from the customers themselves. It shows the customer that you are listening to their problems and are willing to go the extra mile to solve them. This automatically boosts their loyalty to your brand. 

Opt for bug-tracking software to maintain and upgrade the quality of your product. It will help remove flaws from your product before it impact customer experience. Such early detection and resolution showcase your diligence in problem-solving.

Implement regular product updates that target and solve specific customer pain points. While it’s impossible to make everyone happy, addressing the most reported challenges through process optimization goes a long way. 

For example, if you see a steep learning curve as a common complaint in customer feedback, you can take the following measures to address them: 

• Provide in-depth, comprehensible, and visual guides on product usage
• Offer templates to make complex processes easy
• Let customers request free coaching sessions with your product experts 

Or you may find that your product being too expensive is one of the most pressing issues for your customers. To solve this, you can introduce customizable packages for companies of any size. 

This way, business owners can select the features they need. While this will cost them more than a lower-tier plan, they will be spending money on functionalities they would use.

6. Communicate transparently with customers

While being proactive with customer pain points, feedback, and complaints is necessary, you don’t want to overcommit and underdeliver. 

So, ensure you are keeping customer expectations realistic with transparent communication. It will nurture your customers’ trust and improve your brand reputation even if it takes longer to solve some problems. 

Show how you measure customer feedback, drag learning from these suggestions, and plan to use them to enhance your services. Accept your limitations. Acknowledging your failures shows your business integrity and sets you apart from your competition. 

Whenever you make an update based on reported pain points, update them. You can use multiple channels such as social media, bulk emails, blogs, or public announcements about new and improved features, optimizations, and launches. 

Keeping customers in the loop of your improvement process will make them feel valued and boost loyalty and retention.

For example, Hootsuite emails customers about product improvements and has a dedicated product updates page on its website. 

7. Be an empathetic problem solver

Taking a mechanical approach to customer problems may solve the issue for the time being, but won’t show long-term results. Only when you empathize with your clients’ roadblocks will you be able to eliminate them effectively. 

In short, to understand the gravity of customer pain points, you must walk in their shoes and empathize with them. Start by training your employees on emotional intelligence. Show them how to use empathetic language that doesn’t feel like breadcrumbs. 

Phrases like “This must be frustrating for you..” or a simple “So what you mean is..” can show your ability to grasp customer emotions and provide support and solutions accordingly. 

Use sentiment analysis to dig deeper into the customer feedback and decide their real emotions behind words. This will help you take a more empathetic approach while solving the pain points. 

8. Continuously optimize products and services

As you scale your customer base, pain point volume will also increase. So, addressing them through products and process improvements can’t be occasional. To see real changes, you must conduct product and process optimizations continuously. 

Opt for sales acceleration software and social media monitoring software. Invest in a sentiment analysis tool. These are usually designed to generate real-time reports and will help you take action before the pain point results in customer churn. 

How to track customer pleasure

Addressing customer pain points won’t do much if you don’t have a firm grasp on customer pleasure. It gives your pain point elimination process a definite direction and enhances customer satisfaction and retention.

Why Customer Pleasure Matters

Shouldn’t eliminating customer pain points automatically give customers pleasure? It would, but to an extent. But chances are, only relying on pain points will leave several gaps in CX improvements. 

By tracking customer pleasure, you can: 

• Make product updates and optimizations a more dynamic and cohesive process
• Improve customer satisfaction by noticing what matters to them
• Increase loyalty and tension
• Boost customer lifetime value

Methods for Identifying Customer Pleasure

But how do you measure something intangible, like customer pleasure? Here are a few ways: 

1. Surveys and Feedback

Your customers are the best people to tell you what makes them happy. So, conduct surveys and gather feedback to identify customer pleasure. Ask questions like “What’s your favorite aspect of our product?”, “What more can we do to enhance your experience?”, etc. 

2. Customer Success Stories

Talk to happy customers and try to understand what part of their experience was the most pleasurable to them. See which actions and product features helped them achieve success. 

3. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Analysis

A reliable method of measuring customer satisfaction is using NPS tools as an NPS analysis can pinpoint the exact thighs that make your customers happy.

NPS can be a great tool to find out which of your customers might be ready for an upsell or cross-sell. You can use Breadcrumbs lead scoring to set up your own system for this.

How do you do it?

1. First, link your data sources to Breadcrumbs.
2. Next, use the Fit model to pick what shows a customer is ready for an upsell. Maybe you decide 40% is based on their last NPS score and 60% is based on how often they ask for help.
3. Do the same for the Activity model. Perhaps 40% if they joined a customer webinar, and 30% if they looked at a help article.
4. Choose your lead score cut-off point. Let’s say 70.
5. Now, turn on your scoring system.

Get started on making your upsell scoring system with Breadcrumbs today.

4. Using Sentiment Analysis Tools

To delve deeper into understanding customer emotions, consider employing sentiment analysis tools. These tools can analyze customer feedback and identify the underlying emotions and sentiments behind their words. Understanding the emotional aspect of customer satisfaction is crucial in tailoring your products and services to truly meet their needs.

Implementing sentiment analysis allows you to take a more empathetic approach to solving customer pain points and enhancing their overall experience with your brand.

Amplify it

Once you know what makes your customers happy, emphasize them further. Ensure your CX improvements aren’t limited to your products. It should also focus on enhancing experience on your website, demos, or sales calls. 

Keep collecting and analyzing customer data to personalize experiences continuously. You can offer free customized strategies for existing and new customers for sign-ups and upgrades. Incentivize repeat purchases with personalized gifts like company merch and offers. 

Launch a loyalty program with tiered rewards

There is no better way to earn lasting brand loyalty than loyalty programs. It shows your company puts effort into appreciating loyalty and wins long-term customer engagement.

Apart from customer retention, they boost advocacy and increase sales. According to reports, over 70% of customers are likely to recommend a brand with a decent loyalty program. 

Curate programs with a tiered reward system to sustain customers’ interest. It can include discounts, upgrades, cash back, or free add-ons based on the customer’s purchase history. 

Organize user community events or forums

Take customer pleasure up a notch by giving them a sense of belonging through community events and forums. Here, your clients can network, learn from other experts in the industry, and enjoy a fulfilling experience. 

For example, Slack has a separate community page where users can choose to join a chapter according to their interests. 

The SaaS brand also organizes online and offline workshops, seminars, and AMA sessions to engage its user community further. 

While the process of addressing customer pains and pleasure has several moving parts, it is inherently quite simple. Your users pay you to solve a challenge, and if you do it for them well enough while maintaining a smooth CX, retention will soar up automatically. 

Conclusion

As a business, your job isn’t just to provide a good product. You must also deliver a memorable experience to maintain your existing clientele’s volume while acquiring new ones. Otherwise, one unaddressed pain point or little neglect of customer pleasure can cost you their loyalty.

To reiterate what you can do to avoid this, here’s a TL;DR version: 

• Identify pain points through surveys, social monitoring, and third-party review sites
• Prioritize competitor analysis
• Implement feature requests and bug-tracking software
• Update customers on new improvements 
• Start tiered loyalty programs
• Initiate community engagement through events and forums 

Lastly, treat each pain point and pleasure as an opportunity to grow and maintain an empathetic attitude toward problem-solving.